The European Union presents its sanctions regime as a rules-based instrument: a targeted, evidence-driven tool grounded in law. A closer look at recent developments tells a more complicated story.
Last week, the Council of the EU lifted sanctions against Dutch oil trader Niels Troost, who had been designated in 2024 for trading Russian oil above the bloc’s price cap. The reason was straightforward: EU legal advisers assessed that the evidentiary case against him was weak. The political will to maintain the designation was absent, so the listing was dropped. The contrast with how the Council has handled other cases is instructive.
Hungary and Slovakia recently called for the removal of Russian businessmen Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman from the EU sanctions list, arguing that circumstances had materially changed. Usmanov stepped back from active business life nearly a decade ago and relocated to Uzbekistan, where he has since focused on philanthropic activities. Fridman sold his stakes in Russia’s largest private lender, Alfa-Bank, and other assets, in 2024. Both men, Hungary and Slovakia argued, had substantially withdrawn from Russian business life. Continued designation, they said, was no longer warranted.
Both governments also pointed to ongoing proceedings before the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) as additional grounds for reconsideration, given that the Court had already annulled the sanctions imposed on Fridman for the 2022–2023 period on the basis of insufficient evidence. Slovakia went further, proposing a compromise: not an immediate delisting, but a conditional pledge to remove both men from the list if and when the CJEU rules in their favour. The Council rejected that too.
The rejection raises an uncomfortable question. If member states genuinely believed the legal case for maintaining the designations was strong, accepting a mechanism that ties delisting to a court ruling would have posed minimal political risk. The refusal to do so suggests a different calculation – an implicit acknowledgement that the legal foundations in the cases of Usmanov and Fridman may not be as solid as the political consensus behind them.
No case illustrates the dysfunction more clearly than that of another Russian billionaire Dmitry Pumpyansky. Sanctioned in 2022, he stepped down from his companies and successfully challenged his designation before the General Court, which annulled the listing in June 2024.
The Council’s response was not compliance. It was re-imposition under revised justifications. In September 2025, the General Court annulled the measures a second time, finding that press articles, company registry excerpts, and references to attendance at official events did not establish ongoing economic influence. The Council renewed the listing regardless. His lawyers described the pattern as a “perpetuum mobile of illegality.” Two court victories. Still sanctioned.
This is not a procedural anomaly. It reflects something more fundamental: within the EU sanctions framework, the decision to list or delist is ultimately a political act, taken by unanimous vote among member state governments. Courts can review it, and increasingly do. But the political act remains insulated from judicial consequence.
Sanctions in a wartime context are never purely legal instruments. But the consequences deserve acknowledgement. Sanctioned individuals have a formal right to challenge their designation before the CJEU. Those proceedings are real, the legal arguments substantive, and the Court has shown it will rule against the Council when the evidence does not hold. Yet if the Council is free to relist individuals after losing in court, judicial oversight becomes, in practice, optional.
The EU has built a sanctions framework that is politically effective. Whether it is legally coherent is a harder question, and one that, as the case law accumulates, will become increasingly difficult to set aside.
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